Galen Call's Sermon Library
"The Ten Commandments: Remember the Sabbath" - October 4, 1998
Thank you, Kim. Let's open our Bibles together now, please, to the book of Exodus in the 20th chapter as we continue studying together the Ten Commandments. We pick up our reading today in the eighth verse of Exodus 20. It says, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Mark Twain made the comment, "When I was younger I used to remember anything whether it happened or not." I heard a story about a preacher who was counseling one of his parishioners who was having trouble with the neighbor and the preacher said to him, "Look, what you need to do is just put it behind you, forget about it." The parishioner said, "Well, preacher I did forget about it, but my memory is so bad that I forgot I forget." Well, you see, the problem we have as human beings is that we don't have a good memory. We don't remember the things we ought to remember and we forget the things that we ought to forget, ought to remember. Jesus established this table that we're coming to this morning as a means of reminding us of something. He said, "Do this in remembrance of me." You say, "Well, could we ever forget?" Yes, as a matter of fact, we can forget and do forget. The Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy in the first century and said, "Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead." We have a tendency to forget those things that we ought to remember. And here the Lord God establishes for Israel another means by which they were to remember Him. He says to them, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." The fourth commandment of the ten. The word Sabbath means repose, a day of repose, a day of rest, a day of cessation from labor. I want you to think with me this morning about the significance of this commandment. Think of it, first of all, in its relationship to the world, the significance of the Sabbath to the world. The Sabbath relates, it seems, to creation. For here, in this very text, the Lord points back to the creation. And He says in six days, He created the world in all that is in it, and it was followed by a day of rest. And so someone asked, "What was God tired after six days? Did He exhaust Himself in the creation?" And of course the answer, "That is no." God is all powerful and could never exhaust Himself. The reason that He rested was to show His satisfaction. He stopped His work in order to show that it was complete and He was pleased with the totality of it. I think that we can assume that from Adam's time onward, that day was established by the Lord the seventh day as a day for rest. In Genesis 2, verse 2, it says, "The Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." That is, He set it apart. But over time, over the generations from Adam's time, it seems to have been forgotten and obscured by the traditions of men, as men became increasingly pagan, as they turned away from the knowledge of the true God. Cuniform tablets from ancient Babylon speak of Sabatou, a day of rest for the soul among the Babylonians. Some people think that that Babylonian word may be the root of the Hebrew word for Shabbat or Sabbath. Sabatou and Babylon referred to the first, seventh, fifteenth, and twenty-eighth days of each month on which day the Babylonians offered special sacrifice and rested for the soul. And so what I'm saying is that in the Sabbath, there seems to be a significance for the whole world. I believe that God established the day of rest for the entire world from Adam's time on, but it was lost. Sabbath observance then was not man's idea, but God's, and it was given for man's good. The work that man had after the fall in the sin was hard work, arduous work. Now God designed us to work before the time. But the work then was not the kind of toil that we have now as a result of our sin, where we work with the sweat of our brow. Because that fall involved hard work, people needed restoration, and God and His grace had provided for this day of rest. And so the significance of the Sabbath to the world is its commemoration of God's rest after creation. Six days He worked creating the world, the universe that is, but on the seventh day He rested. And the significance of that to the world is that it reminds us that God has set aside a day of rest for all of us. But then we need to look more precisely at this text in Exodus 20 and see that it is a part of God's covenant with Israel and think of the significance of the Sabbath to Israel. Its inclusion here in the Decalogue, in the Ten Words, in the Ten Commandments, incorporated it as a basic part of the moral order within Israel. Of course it already had assigned to it the meaning of creation and God's day of rest. And God reminds them of that here. However, there was also another meaning given to the Sabbath beyond the creation rest. And we see that in Deuteronomy chapter 5 verse 15 if you want to turn over there in your Bible. In Deuteronomy chapter 5 we have a restatement of the Ten Commandments as Moses gave them about 38 years after they were originally delivered. In Deuteronomy He is preaching to the people, a number of discourses He gives to the people of Israel before He dies. And He reminds them of the Ten Commandments. And in the fifth chapter of the fifteenth verse He says, "And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to observe the Sabbath day." So you see there was an additional meaning to the observance of the Sabbath for the people of Israel. It was to remind them of the creative order, but it was also to remind them of God's redemptive work in delivering them from Egypt. And so the significance of the Sabbath to the whole world was God's rest from creation. The significance to Israel was additionally the commemoration of redemption from Egypt. The Sabbath day became one of the signs of this covenant between Israel and their God. There were other signs as well as we know, but the Sabbath day was an additional sign that God gave them so that every week they would remember what God had done for them in their history. He says of Exodus 31, "As for you speak to the sons of Israel, saying, 'You shall surely observe my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you, throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.'" In verse 17, he says, "It is a sign between me and the sons of Israel forever." And so the Sabbath day had a significance beyond the creative order. It was a sign to Israel that they were a redeemed people. Obedience to the Sabbath and the laws that surrounded its observance was evidence and testimony of this special relationship between God and his redeemed under this covenant. And let me say, by the way, that the observance of the Sabbath in Israel did not involve a lazy day of inactivity. It was a day of rest, but it was also a day when they were to have special religious observances and they were to focus on that day, on their concern for the welfare of others, not merely their own comfort. That's why God gave the command that not only were the men to rest, but their households were to rest. Their slaves were to rest. Their animals were to rest. On the Sabbath they were to look beyond their own needs for rest and see that others' welfare was looked after as well. So the Sabbath involved all of those things for Israel. But finally I want us to look at what the significance of the Sabbath is to the church. Are we as the church to observe the Sabbath? That is the seventh day of the week. Of course, Sunday is not the Sabbath. The seventh day of the week. Are we to set that aside for some kind of special observance? The answer to that is no, we are not in a ritual sense. Nine of the Ten Commandments are restated in the New Testament in one form or another, but not the observance of the Sabbath. Why? Well, because it was in fact a special sign of that covenant between Israel and her God, the covenant of the law. Today we are related to God under what the writer of Hebrews calls a better covenant, a superior covenant, that is established upon a superior, a better sacrifice that is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. We have the new covenant with God, and the Sabbath observance is not the sign of the new covenant. In fact, we are specifically warned in the New Testament not to make a legalistic observance of the Sabbath a matter of our faith. It is not for us, and we are not to judge each other on the observance of the Sabbath. Colossians chapter 2 verses 9 through 17 makes that clear. Now that is not to say that therefore we should just work seven days a week and never give a thought about a day of rest. I go back to the first point, and that is that there is a significance to that day of rest for all of the world. God gave that to us for our benefit, and we, even though we are not under Sabbath observance, need to remember that God has ordained a day of rest out of seven for our good, and in that sense we ought to keep it. That is a day of rest. The early church began worshiping on the first day of the week to commemorate the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. It became called the Lord's Day because it was the day of His resurrection, and they remembered His resurrection, and they gathered for corporate worship on that day. As time passed, that began to be the pattern of the church to come together on the first day of the week, and likewise it was not a day for lazy and self-centered indulgence. It was a day for doing of good works. It was a day of looking after one another as well as coming together for worship. As the writer of Hebrews makes clear in the tenth chapter when he says, "Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day approaching." So you see it was the pattern of the early church, not only to worship on the Sabbath, but to stimulate one another with good works, and to encourage one another by looking after the mutual welfare of others. Now, worship on the first day of the week is not a sign of our covenant. It is a pattern that God has given us, and when you stop to think about it, it's an amazing thing that among these Jews initially, the whole pattern of their worship was changed in the early church. You would think that they would gather continually on the Sabbath, but no, when God did the work of redemption through Jesus Christ, it so fulfilled that old covenant. It so completed all of its meaning and its symbolism that a whole new day of worship was ordained by God. It's an amazing thing, but still it's not a sign of our covenant. You say, "Well, what are the signs of the covenant of grace?" What are the signs to us today that we belong to God under the new covenant? Well, there are signs, specifically, there are two that are ordained by our Lord Jesus Himself, Sabbath observance, along with circumcision, where the signs of the old covenant, we today have other signs for the new covenant. You know what they are? One of them is baptism. The immersion of believers into water, symbolizing the death, virulent resurrection of Jesus. That is a sign of the new covenant. That's why it's commanded by our Lord of everyone who believes in Him, because it is an outward sign of their relationship to Him under the covenant of grace. And then there is secondly the sign of the Lord's table, which symbolizes the new covenant that we have with Him. We remember His blood. We remember His body broken for us, so that as we come to this table and observe it, it is a sign to us of the new covenant. And Jesus said, "As we do this, we are to do it in remembrance of Him." To Israel, God said, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." To us in the church, we are said, "Remember Jesus in these elements, for this is a sign of your covenant." And yet, having said that, the Sabbath day has no significance to the church. I do want to assert that the Sabbath day does have a spiritual meaning to the church. The writer of Hebrews again in the fourth chapter points to God's rest, or God's Sabbath, as it were, provided for us in Jesus Christ. That is those of us who enter into that faith relationship with Him. When we think of the Sabbath, it is a reminder to us that we too have ceased from our works as a means of establishing righteousness before God, and that we are resting in the finished work of Jesus Christ on our behalf. That we are reposing upon, we are relying upon the gift of His righteousness that comes by faith. And so in part, I read Hebrews 4, where it says, "There remains therefore a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His, God's rest, has Himself also rested from His works, as God did from His. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall through following the same example of disobedience." That is the example of Israel's unbelief. And so the writer of Hebrews is asserting that salvation, as well as sanctification, God working in our lives, transforming us into Christ's image, that these are the result of faith in the promises of God. They do not come to us because of our fleshly works, our human effort. The salvation and sanctification are both the work of God and we rest upon His promises for them. Charles Ryrie says, "Rest in the Christian life comes through complete reliance on God's promises and full surrender to His will." And so the significance of the Sabbath to the world is that it commemorates God's rest from creation. The significance of God's Sabbath to Israel is His redemption from Egypt. And the significance of the Sabbath to the church is the commemoration of God's rest provided for us in Jesus Christ. And yet there are so many in the world who are seeking somehow to establish through their own human efforts a relationship with God. And they think if they only try hard enough and do enough good deeds, that the result of that will be God will say, "Well done, you can come into my heaven." But that is not the case because God has provided for us a Sabbath rest spiritually. That is a rest, a release from our own labors. That Sabbath rest is found in the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. And when we enter that Sabbath rest, what we are saying is that we are ceasing from our own works anymore toward being good enough people. And that now we are relying along what Jesus did for us. Believing that His death on the cross is sufficient for our sins, that His gift of righteousness is all that we need to be accepted by God. Have you entered into that spiritual Sabbath rest? We sometimes sing the gospel song written by Norman Clayton over 50 years ago now. For some of us, this is contemporary Christian music. The 50 years ago he wrote these wonderful words, "My hope is in the Lord who gave Himself for me and paid the price for all my sin at Calvary. No merit of my own His anger to suppress. My only hope is found in Jesus' righteousness." Have you entered into that rest so that your hope is in the Lord not in your own labors, your own religiosity? If not, I hope that you will today. And with reference to your Christian life, my fellow believer, are you resting in Christ by relying on His promises? That means ceasing to live for yourself and depending upon yourself and striving in the flesh somehow to please God, to measure up to what you want to be. Are you instead resting upon Christ and trusting Him to provide through you the strength that you need to serve God? Are you drawing upon Jesus Christ for what you need? An elderly British minister had come to the end of his earthly journey. And on the morning of what everyone knew would be his last day, a friend remarked to him, "Did you sleep well last night?" And he said, "Well, I did not sleep well, but I arrested gloriously. For I put my head down on three pillows, the pillow of infinite wisdom, the pillow of infinite power, and the pillow of infinite love. It was a beautiful night." Are you exhausted today because of your own fleshly efforts and works? Are you just worn out? Come to the end of yourself, believer? That's not bad because that's the point of which you can begin then to draw upon Jesus Christ. And you can find your Sabbath spiritually in Him. You can rest in Him and rely upon Him now to strengthen you and turn away from your own efforts to serve the Lord in His strength. Somebody has done this little acrostic for rest, R-E-S-T. Tell me what rest means as Christians. First of all, rest means relying. Turn on the promises of God. Secondly, rest means enjoying. Enjoying the fellowship of the Lord. Thirdly, rest means surrendering. Surrendering to the perfect will of God. And finally, rest means triumphing. Triumphing over darkness in Christ. R-E-S-T. As we come to the Lord's table this morning, may that be the repose of our souls, that we're resting on Jesus, that we're relying upon Him. And as we come to the table, we're remembering Him. Because it's so easy for us to forget. Let's pray together. Lord, as you told the people of Israel in all, remember the Sabbath. So you've said to us, "Remember Jesus Christ." Together, just as the churches of Revelation tended to forget, "So do we." And to some of them, the Lord Jesus said, "Remember." And there are many of us this morning who need to remember. And so we partake of this bread remembering Jesus. And His sacrifice for us, the brokenness of His body that we might find freedom from the penalty of our sin. And some of us come to this table this morning, absolutely worn out and exhausted because of fleshly striving. And so today may we rest in Him as we partake. And remember, remember Him. Amen. [Music] [ Silence ]